


Gryphomachie

by afterism



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Competence Kink, F/F, Falling In Love, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-26 13:04:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5005858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterism/pseuds/afterism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Escape never lasts as long as she expects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gryphomachie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Stonestrewn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stonestrewn/gifts).



> Hi Stonestrewn! I was so excited to get you as my assignment, because I loved your prompts and your thoughts on Toast/Furiosa are my thoughts. I dearly hope you enjoy this <333
> 
> The title is from [this article](http://hyperallergic.com/88466/how-ancient-cartographers-mapped-the-world-we-see-today/), because in my head it was fitting and clever.

_i._

It's the dead time of night, dawn still a lifetime away, and Toast is up high on the rocks and pretending the world is nothing but her and the black stretch of the dome above.

The silence makes it easy - it's been hours now since Cheedo stopped whispering into Dag's hair, and less since Angharad stopped shifting with quiet, irritated grunts as she alternated between ignoring the swell of her belly and giving into the need for comfortable sleep. The bright lights of the vault that never shut off make it hard for her to sleep, sometimes, but Toast grinds her tongue up along her teeth and makes use of it instead. She reads, while the others sleep. She stares at the sky, the glare against the glass blocking out any starlight, and imagines the world has just drifted away.

Their beds are the other side of the chamber, at the end of the corridor lined with the only two bookshelves in the whole of the Citadel. In the perfect silence of the pre-dawn Toast can still hear anything louder than her sisters' gentle sleeping breath.

It means she can hear the vault door working before the main wheel has been touched.

There's the familiar clunk of the lock dropping open, and the shriek of it swinging open is loud enough to cover the dry shift of her snatching up her book, forgotten between the sprawl of her legs. Toast holds her breath as still as the air and listens, because this is not his time but no one else would dare -

Footsteps, light and slow like whoever it is is placing each step with painful care, come creeping down the tunnel. She leans closer to the lip of the rock, the rough dust under her palm muffling the noise as the sharp edge bites against her fingertips, and the angle's all wrong for her to see anything before they step out into the chamber but there's a warning shout already coiled in her throat, ready for her sisters.

The footsteps pause, just out of sight. Toast presses her tongue between her teeth.

"Miss Giddy?" whispers a voice; hushed rough and deep but still clearly a woman, and Toast's heart gives an odd little twitch.

Their teacher hardly sleeps these days - she'll lay down with her eyes closed in the evenings while Capable idly picks through a clear flutter of keys on the piano, while the rest have nothing to do but listen and hope that the night will remain just the five of them; but she's always awake as they fold themselves into sleep and still there in the mornings, watching the dull rise of the sun. Even though whispers fall oddly in this cavernous space it's barely a breath before Miss Giddy emerges from among the books.

She pauses as she steps into the main chamber, peering at whoever is standing in the tunnel, and then - "Furiosa," Miss Giddy croaks, and rushes forward on steady feet.

The woman steps forward, a clear stride away from the tunnel and into the light, and Toast can finally see a sharp line from the top of her head to the heel of her boot. Her hair is shorn close (and oh, that twinges familiar); black shine smudged over her temple and beyond where Toast can see; an arm that's half flesh and half functional metal; someone important, then, to be fixed up instead of thrown to the Wretched. Imperator, by the engine grease.

Her book is pinching her thumb as Toast presses it against her chest, caught between the pages, but she only moves to crane a little closer and follow the line of this impossible woman's jaw. There's no softness to her. No invitation in any of her angles.

"I'm leaving, day after tomorrow," Furiosa says, offered carefully into the quiet, and Miss Giddy smiles in a familiar kind of way.

"So soon?" Miss Giddy says, and Toast only realises that's a joke when Furiosa huffs a breath as short and dark as smoke. She tastes charcoal on her tongue.

"If nothing changes," she says, as Toast flicks her eyes to the shadows in the corridor. "Come with me."

"No," Miss Giddy says, immediate and warm. She reaches out and takes Furiosa's unresisting hand, cradling it between her palms. "I have things to do here," she says, and then Angharad appears with Capable a step behind her, and Toast's life takes a sharp left turn.

\---

They don't leave the day after tomorrow. Furiosa promises them nothing, leaves even as Angharad is swearing that they'll do whatever it takes, but still there's a new kind of hope buzzing between them.

The day comes and they wait in agitated half-silences, strung high between treating it like any long, dull day and breathless, inescapable excitement. Furiosa hasn't promised them anything but Dag packs a bag of books and bandages and the trinkets she's woven together, keeps it under her bed and keeps checking like it might disintegrate at dusk.

Toast re-reads the one book they have about cars; a treaty on engine maintenance for a design she's never seen. She hasn't had her hands on a gun in years but she twitches her fingers through the reload of a clip over and over and doesn't let herself think beyond practicalities - she doesn't let the deep itch to escape become a tangible thing, doesn't let herself hope, but it's so close it's thrumming under her skin like war drums.

Her hair is needles against her back, having crept far past her shoulders. She's left it untouched since she first hacked it off on the hope that looking like a wild thing would spare herself from Joe's attention, but suddenly the weight of it is unbearable - and it's absurd, really, how many sharp things they're allowed. Toast cuts it off quick, hard chunks like the first cry of a rebellion, and even though she not thinking of Furiosa at all she's there in every turn of her wrist.

(She hides the offcuts in the cushions, and her hands are distracted enough that she forgets to keep her thoughts in close; she imagines taking handfuls with her to the war rig and dropping locks like breadcrumbs that dull in the dust and disappear under the wheels. A trail eaten by crows. Lost, lost, and never coming back.)

The day passes into night and back again, and the vault door never opens. They take turns to sit at the edge of the dome, in the corner where the Winch Room is a distant ripple through the warped glass, and Toast has her forehead warm against it when the lights in the darkness change; the supply run returned, as perfectly expected. The Citadel grinds on without a murmur.

\---

"I didn't have a clear shot," Furiosa says, but something like hope has settled traitorously in Toast's chest. Her breath hitched when Furiosa strode in and it's still coming too quick for no reason at all. She has the most reckless urge to do _something_ , her weight on the balls of her feet.

It's taken nine days for Furiosa to creep back into the vault, calling for Miss Giddy with a voice as as deep and quiet as the night. Even though it's a scant few hours before dawn everyone except Cheedo is awake; one day on the edge of an imagined escape and they've all forgotten how to sleep properly under the glare of their well-lit cage.

"What about next time?" Angharad asks, stepping forward. Furiosa looks at her for a moment before her eyes slide past, to Miss Giddy behind them all.

"If I take you, we won't get far before someone notices," Furiosa says.

"Well, if you want his attention, stealing his favorite things is a good way to do it," Toast says, arms folded. It's nothing more than an acid-soaked joke but then Furiosa is looking at her properly, for the first time, and so Toast sets her jaw and stares back.

The slant of a smile is a surprise. More so is the way it echoes in her stomach, warm and unfamiliar.

"I know," Furiosa says, glancing across all of them (Cheedo still half-asleep against Dag's side). "That's why you need to do exactly as I say if you want to get out here," she says, and it takes everyone a moment to realise that's a _yes_.

"We will," Capable promises, leading the chorus that echoes it, and with the five of them standing united and angry and together it doesn't feel like a plan of escape - it feels like the beginning of a revolution.

\---

The worst part is, they still have to _wait_. Furiosa was planning her detour for months - five more people and an escape means everything needs to be rethought and renegotiated, replanned for the right window when they can be smuggled out of their cell without anyone seeing and when the war rig is rolling out the next day.

She doesn't visit them often. It's always the dead of night when Furiosa creeps in, pulling the vault door almost shut behind her, and in the sandfilled handful of time they have she runs through every possible useful detail - the war parties they they might encounter in the wastelands, the layout of the tanker they'll be hiding in, the Winch Room and the waiting and the supply run that they're deviating from.

On the blackboard she draws a cobweb of the route through the Citadel from the Biodome down to the Winch Room, the maze of less-used tunnels that will get them to where the tanker will be filled up before they haul it down. Toast stands next to her as Furiosa explains how she's walked it a dozen times, watching every step to see who might see her - refining the plan to an art because they're only going to get one shot at this. She's the one who'll get shredded if they're caught.

(Toast traces the route over and over, until she can erase and recreate it as easy as a memory. She pictures Furiosa walking every step; her faultless stride, her dismissive side-long looks at anyone who tries to block her. Toast can throw a good punch but the thought of walking easily with her chin held high seems even sweeter, somehow.)

"But where are we going?" Cheedo asks, two months in. The vault is warm and bright under the morning sun, Dag and Cheedo making shallow splashes in the pool with their feet as Angharad makes them run through the plan again. Everyone looks to Miss Giddy, but none of them quite expect her to answer.

"To the Green Place, I expect," she says, not smiling. "Where our Furiosa was born."

Toast sits up from her backrest of books. "What?" she says, almost too quick to be an actual question.

"How do you know?" Capable asks, and between them they get every detail they can. There's not much. The Green Place of Many Mothers is somewhere only Furiosa has seen, only Furiosa has spoken about, and they're hearing it all through Miss Giddy's mouth spun electric and hopeful - but it's another thing to cling to to get them through these months of waiting.

Angharad's promise that _we are not things_ has become a mantra but now there's more; she repeats _the Green Place of Many Mothers_ as she falls asleep until it's just murmurs of _many_ , until the utopia they're aiming for is almost more important than their war cry of individualism.

Furiosa's next visit is too close to dawn for her to stay any longer than a breath; just checking in because she hasn't had the chance to see them for days, but she catches Toast near the mouth of the tunnel with her metal arm suddenly blocking her across the waist. Toast is still half a step away but she pulls up short.

"If things go wrong," Furiosa starts, her voice hushed, like it's trying to wrap itself in the shadows. The rest of them at scattered throughout the chamber, far enough way for the illusion of privacy, but whispers carry strangely. "I might need one of you to drive the rig for a while."

"I can do it," Toast says, immediately, feeling warm and reckless.

"You know how to drive?" Furiosa asks. There's nothing behind it.

 _In theory,_ Toast doesn't say. "Yes," she says, with a lift of her chin.

Furiosa considers her for half a second, her eyes flicking down to Toast's soft hands, and then she nods. "I'll show you the kill switch sequence," she says.

They use the blackboard to sketch out the Rig's dashboard, Furiosa leaving white smudges as she fingers the switches. Toast stands beside her, so close she can feel the heat of Furiosa even in the controlled warmth of their chamber and repeats it once, twice - perfect before erasing the board and Furiosa doesn't ask if she'll remember it.

She glances across all of them just before she leaves, the first hints of blue flooding inky across the sky, but she's looking at Toast when she promises, "Soon."

(Toast knows the quickstep of her heart is the call to run, but part of her suddenly wants to be running with Furiosa, and not just running _away_.)

\---

They don't need to be told to be prepare, because they've been on the balls of their feet and ready to run for weeks.

Furiosa comes for them in the dead, silent hours of the night, a shotgun held low against her thigh.

"We said no unnecessary killing-" Angharad starts.

"It's a precaution," Furiosa says. "You ready?"

Of course they are. Angharad leads, with Capable a step behind. Dag trails her fingers along the tunnel wall as they pad their way through it, her bag packed and repacked to vital perfection clutched in the other hand. None of them look back, but Miss Giddy stands by the mouth of the tunnel and presses their hands in turn; her tongue, for once, still.

The vault door is swinging outwards with a thin creak as Furiosa pushes it gently, and Toast gets a glimpse of green, the crop shelves heavy and unmoving. Furiosa, inexplicably, hesitates, and then -

"Check the coast is clear," she tells Toast, and turns on her heel, disappears back up the tunnel. Angharad gives a hiccup of a shout after her but Toast has only been listening for a few seconds, her tongue pressing between her teeth, when the loud beat of her steps start up again.

"Let's go," Furiosa says, marching towards them alone. The shotgun's gone.

They file out together, walking quick and light because no mask can disguise the fact they don't have the bodies of war boys; their plan relies so desperately heavily on not being seen that Toast is a pillar of tension, ready to flinch at any sound. Furiosa strides in front of them and Toast falls into step behind her, fists clenched and her chin held high.

A gunshot would have made an alarm bell out of any defence if they used it in these sonorous corridors, where every step seems to echo relentlessly. When they make it to the Winch Room, huge and cavernous and overwhelmingly busy even in its stillness, smelling of grease and metal and blood, Angharad takes her hand and squeezes.

"Whatever happens, we're going to the Green Place," she whispers, looking straight ahead.

Every step is terrifying as they skitter their way to the tanker, chains and tools and a hundred hidden things to trip them as they move as fast as possible, all of them too clean and too bright for this grimy space - but they make it. The tanker seems at first too big and then far too small as they climb up into the hold (Toast gets a glimpse of the cab as Furiosa takes Dag's bag and pushes it somewhere in the back, low and hidden, but she glares them all back to the tanker), and Furiosa's the one to pull the hatch closed.

"Stay out of sight," she says, a beat before walking away, and that's all they've got to get them through the hours until the convoy will roll out. They're so close and they've done everything they possibly can, just a few short hours of discomfort to go that are nothing compared to what she's endured - Toast doesn't want to think about yesterday or tomorrow so she pillows her head on her arms, Capable a warm press beside her as they all settle as best they can, and tries to sleep her way into nothingness.

(But she catches herself imagining it in the half-waking beats; Furiosa's stride and her head held high; the green place, bright and lush around them as she lets her fingers slide around Furiosa's palm; together in the front of the war rig doing nothing but watching the empty horizon rush closer, as the sky streaks orange and gold and whatever's behind them is nothing but a speck of dust in the mirror - )

* * *

_ii._

So, they come back. The Citadel's a shell but they fill it with anyone who wants to come up, flooding the corridors with people who press their skin against the cool, rough walls and sigh as though that's all they've ever wanted.

And suddenly, they're overwhelmed with things to do. They proved one legend was just a lying old man but now they've become half-myths themselves, the wives who drove off into the desert and came back goddesses.

("The breeders are back!" one of the older white-dipped boys cries when they reach the top, sounding perfectly, innocently happy about it.

"The _wives_ ," a smaller boy corrects him with a sharp nudge of his elbow.

"The Sisters," Capable shouts over it all, loud enough that it splashes across the Winch Room and drips back down the cliffside and that's what they become - the founding family, the Sisters of Liberation. The new leaders of the Citadel.)

Capable doesn't like it. Toast holds her chin high and uses it to stride down the tunnels without being blocked.

Furiosa leads the last of the Vuvalini down to the workshops; Capable looks at every war pup and holds out her hand; Cheedo gently helps anyone who needs it; Dag goes straight up to the top of the Citadel, where everything is green and growing. Toast finds her way back to the vault, through the crop shelves to the huge, shining door that still stands half open - and then she rallies up enough strong arms to rip it out and have it dragged down to the workshops, to be wrenched apart and melted down.

It's not entirely for the catharsis. The surge from Joe's private pool drained the whole thing dry in a few hours as the ground far below became sodden and sticky, the water quickly soaking down under the sand and out of reach. Toast found her way to the platform just as the pipes were starting to splutter and burp, sucking at water that was no longer there.

"Move," she said, to the thin woman standing in front of the wheels. The pumps were still working but too slowly to catch up, the great slide of metal clunking loudly as Toast ran her fingers down the pipe of controls, tips catching on gages and locks and dials sweeping towards the red.

"Shut it off!" Toast called, to the Mothers still at the edge of the rock, and it wasn't until the suction cut off with a splurge of silence that the thrill of being _obeyed_ caught up with her - and after that, no one else dared touch the pumps. Everyone looked to her for what to do next.

Like hell was she going to waste this. Toast becomes an engineer purely on the necessity of the Citadel needing one.

There must have been pipes that lead out from the mouth of the Citadel once, great metal tubes that were ripped apart and beaten down to make cages and cars. There's such little good steel left, especially after the wreckage they left out in the wastelands was picked over by the Buzzards - hence, the vault door.

They reforge the pipes and salvage taps from the irrigation system, using anyone who's willing to hold a hammer or a blowtorch to haul it together. Toast isn't one of those who does most of the metal but she designs every join and learns to weld anyway; thankful for her short hair, strangely fond of the flashburn scars that have started peppering her arms. Her worth has nothing to do with the perfection of her skin. They're going to rebuild the Citadel into something that _works_.

\---

"Like this," Toast says, adjusting the angle of a turn in the metal. The workshop is bright with the forges and sparks, ringing with heat and hammering that glitters around the cave, and there's a twist in the flow that needs to be perfected. Explaining herself to their makeshift team of metalworkers is the best way they have, so she's here in the heat and thinking only of hydraulics as she glances around the cave.

Furiosa stands on the other side of the workshop, her left arm still bare, a wrench gripped in her hand. One of the Vuvalini is by her side, an engine hauled up on chains between them - and it's been a handful of days since Toast last saw her but the longing that rocks through her veins sends her fingers gripping hard around the pipe to stop herself stumbling forward. Furiosa looks up, catches her eye. Smiles like the strike of a hammer on hot metal. Doesn't come over.

They have the whole Citadel to look after, Toast thinks, focusing hard on the gleam of the bolts. It's not like they need each other now.

\---

Once the door was gone Toast assumed the vault would be stripped down and filled up with whoever wanted it - instead, she finds, it's been left almost completely untouched. It was the home of the Sisters before they became what they are; perhaps, then, it's sacred in its own way.

So Toast uses it, keeps Angharad's words and the books and the blackboard but gets rid of the beds, not thinking about everything that has happened in there because she has something for her hands to do. It's brightly lit at all hours and she wipes clean the board and sketches waterflows in chalk, designing the pipes leading to taps so those still out in the open can always have water without keeping it in stagnant pools - keeping it as untainted and safe as anything in this wasteland can be.

It's a start. The pipes aren't yet finished when she scrubs the board clean and starts thinking of what else needs building, clicking her tongue as she stares at the dusty streaks. She thinks of the cobweb map Furiosa drew of the Citadel (remembers the dashboard and fingertip smudges, the warmth of Furiosa by her side, and _not now_ ). She rubs the chalk between her fingers, and then she recreates it.

It grows: Toast adds the tunnels she knows, the caves she's seen, the doors she's passed but not yet gone through. She visits her sisters and they talk about their plans for the Citadel, as they space themselves out across it. They're connected as they ever were in the vault, it just all feels - larger, somehow. Like their world has exponentially expanded but they're still the pillars of it.

Toast adds the walkways that connect the mountains. She goes exploring purely for the sake of expanding her map (she runs into Furiosa more often than she would have expected, but they both have things to do -), and she finds wonders; catacombs deep down in the earth that ring in perfect harmony when she strikes the join between them; a deep pool with no source that she can see, that lights up with tiny flashes when she sticks a paintbrush in it and swirls.

She finds a space that must have belonged to Joe, because it's filled with a books she's never seen and blank paper and _writing equipment_ , pens and ink and chalk in more colours than orange and white. There's handwritten diaries that she glances at and throws to the furnaces, because she's already had a lifetime of his delusions. There's fabric, the uniform muslin of the wives, and Toast carries bundles of that back to the vault because some things are too useful to burn.

(She wants, ridiculously, to find Furiosa and show her everything she's found. To take her by the hand and lead her down to these quiet, secret spaces that won't belong to anyone but them, and she doesn't know when that desire to be near her became this want to find out if that red-metal smile is as hot against her mouth as she imagines it must be -- but it has been a lifetime since Toast let herself want anything other than freedom, and now she wants one thing so much she feels dizzy with it. She doesn't know how to _do this_.)

It gets to the point where the blackboard is no longer big enough, and the scale of the twisting, interlocking caves is too complicated for this narrow block of black. So Toast pulls up the white muslin, the new and the old and she tears it up and re-stitches it until it's one huge, blank canvas, and then she maps out the Citadel properly. It sits like a labyrinth, cobwebbing across the fabric.

She writes names for the places whose names are unchanged, leaves others blank or vague (the Organic Mechanic's workshop is now the Vuvalini's; the Milking Room now where Capable is learning how to heal and care for a hundred small children; and they're going to make this work so she'll still be here to fill in the blanks when they're settled).

Her pen hesitates next to the vault. She could call in the Library, as she seems to be hoarding all the books still. Case in point - not everything she brought back from the Keeper of the Seeds grows but Dag keeps trying, keeps rifling through Toast's library for another hint of how each strange seed needs cherishing. The hardy ones, those with dark leaves and fleshy roots are spilling down the cliffside in abundance, and their food is slowly filling with herbs and flowers and vegetables Toast has only read about. They have cookbooks, too, and Cheedo seems determined to read every one.

She gets through the long trunk of the L before she stops, and makes it a T. _Toast's Workshop_ , she declares, because she still has so much more to do.

\---

When her map of the Citadel is almost complete, Toast starts to quietly panic. Before they escaped she read every book in the vault in the desperate need to do _something_ , even as her fingers drummed against her thighs and Dag would throw an arm across her eyes and fall against the dust-coloured pillows. She watched and considered and learned because there was nothing else to occupy her; because one day she would get the chance to get out and she wasn't going to miss it.

She still, quite urgently, needs something to _do_. Everyone else has found their purpose; Capable and her war pups, Dag and her seeds, Cheedo learning to listen and lead, the Vuvalini settling in to having a community around them again, to not having to kill everyone who gets close.

It's just her and, well, Furiosa, who are a little lost once again. And oh, that's an idea tucked away in there, a part of a plan she's not yet admitted she's making - but Toast looks at the blackboard, at the sprawling, abandoned mess of her first attempt at a map, and thinks bigger.

There's plenty of muslin left, blank and waiting. She draws a small, red heart to mark the Citadel, and starts to trace out what she knows of the wall of mountains, the canyon (still blocked, but it won't be long until it's pecked over completely), the distance to Gas Town and the Bullet Farm and everything she can see from the dome.

It looks very small, her tiny world in the middle of all that canvas. She has old memories of dusty, indistinguishable cities, and fresher ones of everything on one route through the wasteland - but she only has the vaguest sense of where the place with all the crows was, other than East. The plains of silence are a question mark somewhere off the edge in the same direction.

Obviously, she needs to go out there and find these things for herself. She has other, smaller projects, but nothing as important as redefining the world around her.

(Perhaps that's the problem - regardless of all the practicalities that have lead her back under the glass dome, it still leaves her with the desperate urge to _get out_.)

\---

The echo of footsteps clunking down the tunnel are as good as a knock. She has her map spread out in front of the glass, the fabric big enough to be spilling across the steps, and she's copying it onto a smaller scrap ready to make ink trails across the wastelands.

She doesn't look up until - "When are you going?" Furiosa says.

Toast doesn't drop her pen, but the outline of the mountain bleeds a little thick. "Soon," she says, calm. She wonders if she's imagining the heat against the back of her neck, the ache in her spine that makes her want to do _anything_ but stay crouched and still. She doesn't move. "How did you know?" Toast asks, and when Furiosa doesn't reply she glances behind her.

She's by one of the long tables held up by books, her hand hovering a breeze away from the pulley system Toast has been experimenting with. There are pistons and gages and every scrap of leather she's managed to scrounge up spread across the bench, sandstone carved into digits and her notes, intimately sprawled underneath -

Toast swallows. "It's not finished yet," she says, into the silence.

Furiosa doesn't say anything for a short while, her fingertips finally landing on the long steel rod that Toast has carefully notched with a half-hearted plan. "Can you make it work?"

"I think so," Toast says, shrugging even though Furiosa isn't looking at her. "It might not be as good as your last one, but-" Toast catches herself, presses her tongue against her teeth. "It'll work," she says firmly.

And when Furiosa finally glances over at her, a sidelong look skitters along the floor before catching warm in all the strangest places, there's an open admiration in her eyes that's so raw Toast can only swallow, and hope her mouth is smiling back.

Maybe that's why she's so caught - because after years of being a precious object, her worth wrapped up entirely in her skin and her hair and her flesh, from the very beginning Furiosa didn't look at her like anything but a liability until she proved herself useful.

Furiosa looks away. "I'm coming with you," she says, with a nod towards her muslin map. "Let me know what you need."

 _You_ , Toast doesn't say, and Furiosa's footsteps are echoing back down the corridor before she can find anything else on her tongue.

\---

"Wait, I'll go - wait there," Dag says, and hurries off between the trellises. There's dirt under her fingernails and a smudge across her cheekbone as she's tucked her hair behind her ears, the rest loose and glowing down her back. There's nothing but leaves between them and the sun but the air feels cooler, cleaner; green in every direction she can see.

Toast shifts her weight. Even the ground feels softer under her feet, giving slightly without slipping.

"I never thought I'd see these again," Furiosa says, her fingers catching under a white, gently folded flower, and even though the gardens are busy with everyone who wants to be surrounded by green things it feels endlessly private, a maze of bright possibilities and quiet voices. Toast stands as close to Furiosa's side as she would to any of her sisters and feels stupidly daring with it.

Their knuckles brush when Furiosa drops her hand, and Toast doesn't move. She forgets, sometimes, how much taller Furiosa is.

"Dag might be a while," Toast says, and dares to ghost her fingertips along Furiosa's wrist as she turns away, a shock of skin before she walks a few steps down the path and follows the twist between the vines. The pads of her fingers are tingling.

The path is just wide enough for them to walk side by side, for those who don't mind their shoulders brushing with every step. Furiosa catches up and falls in beside her within a few paces, and that's everything Toast needs for the lightness in her chest to glow bright and fierce as the smothering leaves. A tentative kind of hope unfurled and pushing steadily towards the sun.

"Here?" Furiosa says, when Toast ducks under a tendril hung heavy with purple flowers. A pause, and then the leaves brush and whisper as Furiosa pushes it out of the way, following her into the small, green-lined clearing that makes Toast think of waterfalls she's never seen. It's no larger than the cab of the war rig, circular and smelling of damp earth and crushed leaves instead of dust and hot metal.

"She'll find us," Toast shrugs, and when the heat against her neck gets too much she glances behind her, a half turn that makes the brush of her hand against Furiosa's almost entirely accidental - but she's too full of sunlight to not let her fingers slide around Furiosa's palm, everything bright and lush around them. Her heart is too large in her chest but she swallows it down, and looks up.

Furiosa is looking at her like she's something spectacular; her mouth soft, her gaze warm, and there's an invitation in the corner of her lips that Toast has never seen. It catches behind her lungs and ignites, makes her feel impossible and perfect and Toast is pushing up on her toes as Furiosa folds down, a kiss catching somewhere in the middle that sends the whole world away.

It's the opposite of dizziness, because the world isn't tilting; it's disappeared entirely, left nothing but her and Furiosa.

\---

"Come back safe," Capable says, tapping her fingernails low on the car door.

The edge of the window digs into her arm as she leans out, but Toast rests her chin on her forearm and grins down at her, quick and happy. "I'll bring you back some more strays," she says, and laughs when Capable just folds her arms and raises her chin at her.

"Ready?" Furiosa says, the driver's side door slamming shut with a creak, and off they go. There's no procession; Capable and a handful of her boys have come to wave them off but they quickly disappear in the mirror, and soon it's just her and Furiosa in the front bench of this car the Vuvalini have been fixing up. Dag has entwined a flower around the spokes of the steering wheel.

"Where first?" Furiosa says, when the Citadel is little more than dust on the wing-mirror, and Toast bites her lip and reaches out, linking her fingers through Furiosa's.

"West," she says, curling her legs up underneath her, and together they watch the empty horizon rush closer, as the sky streaks orange and gold.


End file.
